


i would dig up a thousand graves

by braithwaites



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, First Kiss, Grief/Mourning, Necromancy, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, Public Sex, Spoilers, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-07 02:23:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17357132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/braithwaites/pseuds/braithwaites
Summary: Sean MacGuire didn't get a chance to rest. Love tracked his body down. Love brought him back.





	1. Chapter 1

“Sean's dead.”

Those words followed her through the whip-thin trees. They stepped on the ragged hem of her skirt and threatened to trip her, but she didn't fall. She kept moving, the ground soft and grass cool beneath her stockings. Each step fell as firm as the one before. Her heel dug into the dirt, toes spreading as she followed through to the ball of her foot.

She couldn't hate Bill for what he said or the clumsy way he said it. He'd lost a companion, like she had. A friend, like she had.

And that was all Sean was to Ophelia Buckley.

Regardless of the callused, freckled hands pressed up her skirt. Regardless of the curious light in his eyes every time she walked towards him. Regardless of his laugh, of his slim little smile, of the way his willow branch of a body curled over her to watch as she worked. Regardless.

Her palm caught on a stray piece of bark. It tore at her skin easily enough, drawing a jagged line of pale pink to the surface.

Ophelia knew what she could do. She knew the power she carried with her – not in her voice, but in her touch. Never in the way you'd expect from a saloon girl.

Her talents couldn't be summed up in an afternoon or paid for with a dollar. They were more than a poke or a tug.

They were...

Waning light poured across the sky, making a ceiling for the world that was the same fiery orange as her hair. The leaves around her darkened to a glossy black, and the bodies of the trees looked like shadows of their former selves, like monstrous fingers lanced up through the dirt, like someone rising.

All she had was a direction. Bill jabbed a finger the way he'd come when she asked him where he buried Sean. She followed a winding trail through the trees, every breath smelling of cigarette smoke and dirt and the imagined notes of decay.

A body didn't decompose in an hour. A body didn't decompose in a day.

Bill had to have found a clearing. Burying Sean in a place where no one could ever find him was too cruel. Thoughtful, given the atmosphere in Rhodes, but cruel.

He deserved a coffin, but outlaws rarely even got six feet of earth above them.

 _Sean's dead_.

Ophelia blinked around the rush of heat behind her eyes. He'd given her nothing else before she pushed past him to head in the direction he'd come out of the woods. The _how_ or the _why_ didn't come along with the _what_. He was dead; she was the only person in the world – to her knowledge – who could do something about that.

So, she searched. She searched until her stockings were soaked through, torn through at the heel from an errant rock. She searched until the sun was gone, and the sky was a smoky blue.

The moment she found the clearing, Ophelia took a deep breath. Her lungs ached in relief. Her shoulders sagged. Her thighs threatened to buckle.

In the middle of the clearing was a pile of stones. A homemade cross etched with his name stood at the head, pierced through the packed dirt at a slight angle. Beyond the freshly covered grave was the same lake they saw every morning upon waking. She didn't know its name. She didn't care.

Each step that pushed her closer to Sean's body beneath the dirt and the rocks and the crushing heartbreak she hadn't been given the means to anticipate.

An owl cooed at her back, disturbing her silence so suddenly that she fell forward at the foot of the grave.

Hesitation broke into something sharp at the edges.

She didn't know how many stones covered Sean's grave. She didn't have the sense to count them. All she knew was that they had to be removed, one by one, before she could reach him.

Blackwater was a few states over.

Her first memories of Sean were _there_ rather than in Lemoyne, sparkling rather than covered in the rust of dried blood.

Dutch got her attention first. He had a way of doing that, no matter how much or how little the girl knew about him. She dropped down into his lap and tipped his hat back to reveal his distant, dark eyes and all his practiced charm.

He was busy, you see. There were others in the gang who could keep her occupied for a time.

'Hand her over ta me, Dutch,' said someone a few chairs away, his accent thick and hands reaching eagerly. Not handsome, but _sweet_. A little too excited, like a kid with a chocolate bar. 'I'll keep this beauty nice and occupied.'

Ophelia's fingers tripped over a stone. She grasped onto it until her palm ached before throwing it aside, meeting the others in a _clack_.

She'd spent hours on Sean's lap that night, getting to know him and getting to know the gang. They played blackjack; he let her bet. They won more than they lost.

By the time half of the stones were discarded, her hands shook like leaves in a strong wind. They twitched with a certain amount of violence, scraped bloody from the porous surface of the rocks and their sharp angles. But there were more, so she pushed up on her knees, the front of her dress covered in freshly laid dirt.

Sean asked her if her family was Irish on account of her pretty orange hair and freckles that covered her like a thrown handful of cinnamon. She said they were from New York, but she knew that somewhere in her blood, there was something tying her to the land he was from.

He asked her if she enjoyed her work, if it wasn't too boring always having old men trying to sneak their hands up her skirt.

She told him it wasn't any different from young ones trying to do the same.

'Awh, come on. It's gotta be better than that.' He thrummed his hand over her thigh and tipped a smile up at her, curled at the edges. 'My fingers ain't stiff with age.'

Three stones remained crowded against the cross.

Two stones. One.

And then...

Ophelia bit back a sob as she curled her hands around the wooden cross. Only then did the pain reach her, only then did she realize her palms were slick with blood.

The power in her limbs was bleeding away just as surely as her hands, but she dug her knees down into the dirt and pushed herself up, throwing her weight upwards. Her palms slid over the stake once before she managed to grab hold and tug the cross from the ground.

She threw it aside, her blood black against the dark wood.

The dusty blue of dusk had darkened since she pushed out into the clearing. Night fell quietly, surrounding her with the silvery touch of the moon and impenetrable shadow.

Her pale hands pierced the loose dirt, like starlight tearing into the void.

And as she dug, she remembered a song her papa sang from his time serving as a soldier in the Civil War – too old to have been fighting, too useful to be left behind. The words came to her as if she spoke with his mouth rather than her own, each lyric finding her in the dark even after so many years.

“ _The minstrel boy will return, we pray_ ,” she began, her voice hoarse from the stinging of dirt and the burning of broken skin. “ _When we hear the news, we will all cheer it_.”

Tears clogged up her throat. With dirt up to her elbows, Ophelia kept digging, throwing what she could aside or behind her. Digging up a grave felt impossible – scooping up the recently turned dirt, pushing deeper and deeper into what seemed to be without end.

 _Unfair_ was the word that she kept circling back around to. Unfair, that they weren't able to say goodbye. Unfair, that they had never done more for each other. Their idle flirtations could have become something else, down the line, if they'd been given enough time.

Her song broke with a quiet, “Please!”

Pushing her fingers pushed into the dirt again, past roots and squirming beetles, she felt something more, something different, something malleable and cold.

The curved tip of his nose.

Desperation's sharp edges smoothed in an instant. Her frenzied clawing stopped with her next breath, and she strained to feel more than that through the dirt that she carefully dusted away from his face.

Skin the color of ice on a frozen river, closed eyes with orange lashes that were caked with dirt. Above his brow, the gunshot wound that killed him was full of dirt.

“ _The minstrel boy will return one day_ ,” Ophelia whispered, even though she knew well enough the work that she'd need to do before those closed eyes opened again. “ _Torn perhaps in body, not in spirit.”_

Ophelia stood unsteadily before the crevice she'd dug at the head of the grave. Covered in dirt and blood and moonlight, she wiped her palms over the ruined fabric of her skirt and rolled the sleeves of her shirtwaist up to her elbows.

Exhuming Sean took hours. Hours of wordless almost-silence, of pained grunting, of sweat curling down her nose and over her scalp. And once she was done, she stared down at him, the clearing a mess of black dirt and an upturned cross.

Perhaps in body, not in spirit.

She knew that she could only do so much, no matter her power. She knew that dragging someone unwilling from beyond the end was a painful and often damaging process. She'd never seen anyone brought back who hadn't wanted it desperately. Her papa wasn't that kind of man, and she wasn't that kind of woman.

“God,” Ophelia whispered as she lowered herself down into the grave. Bill hadn't been able to manage more than a few feet. She was grateful for that. “Make this easy on me, sweetheart.”

Grabbing for his wrists, she turned his hands over. His limbs were stiff, but she managed to turn them over just enough to do what she had to do.

Palm to palm.

Ophelia shut her eyes and drew in a long breath. Her fingers curled around his, squeezing tight onto his immovable flesh. He felt like ice, but she was burning up.

“Come back,” she whispered into the dead of night _to_ the dead, to Sean, with her mind full of him. It was easy to think of a future he might have had – an enticing something to coax him back from the end. It was easy because she'd been thinking of it for weeks as they traveled and as they talked and as they tread carefully around what they wanted. “You've still got this.”

She pushed an image of Dutch's hand on his shoulder and Hosea's fond smile and a good-natured roll of Arthur's eyes. She pushed a memory of them, sharing a cup of whiskey, her knees tucked over his.

She pushed into him _warmth_ and _friendship_ and _love_.

Love.

Good lord, she really was in love with him.

Ophelia nearly startled out of her skin when his fingers twitched. The retrieval was usually a violent thing – screaming, clenched muscles, delirious rambling. There was only so much endless black you could wade through before going back splintered what sense you had.

But with Sean, he returned to her slowly. His fingers twitched first, but then she began to feel his flesh warm. Beneath his eyelids, his eyes shifted as if he was dreaming. His lips parted, baring a sliver of uneven teeth. He made no sound. Neither did she.

She waited as his heart remembered how to beat. She waited and watched with a held breath.

Then, quietly, she said, “Sean.”

His eyes opened slowly, lashes shuddering as he blinked out the dirt. They watered, bleeding tears down over his temples. Once they were clear, he stared up at her, his eyes like emeralds shining through earth.

Sean moved before she could. He lurched upwards, his arms winding around her waist. She felt herself tugged closer without a thought spared towards the blood or the sweat or the damp dirt that clung to almost every inch of her.

Their first kiss was what pushed her to breathe again.

His lips stumbled. Her heart's own hitched steps found somewhere to slow, and she kissed him back, her fingers diving deep into his dirty, orange hair.

Ophelia sighed and shivered and held him close.

He tasted of dirt rather than death.


	2. Chapter 2

“I knew you was coming for me. That's why I waited 'round like I did.”

Ophelia smiled a winsome smile, a lock of orange hair shifting against the curve of her cheek. She never asked men what it was like to be brought back, what colors they remembered from death. She never asked, and usually, they never told her.

But Sean talked and talked and talked, like nothing had ever happened, his brow bound in linen bandages to hide the hole in his head.

She wasn't a healer, after all. She was a ferry heading in the other direction.

“Everyting was already dark when I felt ya pulling at me hands,” Sean said, his trembling fingers sliding against hers. They were callused and sweet, just like him. “Then, I opened me eyes, and there you were, all shadowy like someting out of a campfire story.”

Her laugh barely made it out from between her pressed lips, more of a rumble in her mouth than a true sound.

“I _am_ something out of a campfire story,” Ophelia said as her fingers clasped around his. There was no holding someone who was recently raised still. They shook like they were coming down from a high – teeth chattering, muscles tensing, heartbeat flickering. “A particularly frightening one.”

“Nah.”

Sean kicked his head back in a scoff, dirty red hair falling over his shoulder and down his back.

“There's nothing frightening about you, Ollie.” He gathered up her hands and pressed stumbling kisses over her knuckles, which were the only parts of her from the wrist down that hadn't been bandaged. They were both wrapped up in white and halfway to clean. “You're an angel, in my books.”

Around them, a strange air settled over the camp as everyone settled in for an uneasy night.

There was something painful about being denied the chance to grieve once the grieving has already started, like leaning into a sinking feeling only to be pulled up just short of falling. Those who saw Sean die avoided looking at him, and no one had seen hair nor hide of Bill Williamson since Ophelia and Sean returned from the woods.

It was as if they'd all forgotten what she was capable of.

Or, it was as if they wanted to forget.

Everyone except Sean, who stared at her as if she was a second sun, who held onto her as if she was the only thing anchoring him to the ground. And, in a way, she was.

“I'm no angel,” Ophelia whispered, her head bowing towards his as she spoke. “I'm just... tired.”

Sean let go of her hands only to cup both of her cheeks in his warm palms. They were hotter than they'd ever been, even after being pressed between their bodies or hidden under a stack of blankets or held over a fire. Every little thing she noticed reminded her of how unnatural his being there was, and she couldn't find it in herself to regret bringing him back.

 _He wanted this_ , she reminded herself. _Or else, he wouldn't have come along._

His eyes were dark and shiny without a lamp to light them. The details of his face were lost in a sea of dark blue with the moon at his back. She could see each individual freckle, dark as coal on his skin, but the colors – the cream and the orange and the gold – were gone, faded. He was the sort of man who only looked like himself in the sun.

“Listen to me, would ya?” Sean asked. He tipped his head forward, forehead pressed to hers. She could feel the place where his skull was cracked open, even though layers of bandage. “What happened... I don't wanna think about it. It was just pain and then nothin', not until you woke me up.”

“Sean...” Her fingers curled into his dusty vest and the plain cotton shirt he wore under it. “You don't have to explain anything to me.”

He pressed closer. She felt his breath against her chin.

“I fucking do,” he said. “You need ta know what it felt like.”

A barely suppressed shudder, a clawing dread –

“I don't want to.”

Ophelia tipped her mouth down and pressed it to his. She tugging him closer to her, then closer again, not stopping until his shoulders bumped into hers and they toppled backwards onto their bedrolls, pushed together out of a need to be close to each other.

His body was heavy, hot, real. He reacted as someone who'd never tasted death would react, and that made it easier.

“Not now, then.” Sean stumbled over his words, hitching himself up onto his knees as Ophelia pulled her skirt up over her thighs. They were pale shapes in the dark, nothing more. “But later. Later on, oh, I'll tell ya how it felt.”

His body ran hotter. His heart, faster.

When he pressed his hips down between her thighs, he groaned low in his throat and held on even more tightly. There was life in him, but there was magic, too. A nonsensical fire that Ophelia couldn't see as anything more or less than a gift. Because gifts could be given without an explanation, bestowed upon a lucky few who were left to wonder.

She stopped wondering as he curled over her, mouthing kisses against her throat. The press of his teeth took her worries in-hand and threw them away. Even knowing they were bound to circle back, she shut her eyes and smiled.

Opportunities were lost easily enough, but sometimes, they came back.

“Are you sure about this?” Sean asked her, confidence wavering like a hound on a leash. There was no denying the tether, but she didn't want to rule over him. “You can change your mind.”

Ophelia spread out beneath him. Her thumbs hooked into the waist of her bloomers, and she pushed them down, hips lifting up from the bedroll. That was enough of an answer in her eyes, but Sean required more than that. She nodded. He flashed her a smile.

“Right, then.”

His hands fumbled like a virgin's with the buttons of his trousers. Ophelia reached down to help him just a moment too late, though she was more than happy to brush her bandaged fingertips over his stomach instead, marveling at the way the muscles twitched and tensed under her touch.

Sean's cock wasn't mighty, but it was burning hot to the touch and thick enough to stand proudly. That pride was mirrored in his face, in the set of his shoulders. If he had been nude, he might have rested his hands on his waist before strutting around like a rooster, but just then, he used them to keep his trousers hitched up. They were out in the open, after all, and he wanted to shield her from prying eyes as much as possible.

“Whisper pretty things to me, Ollie,” he said as he lowered himself down on top of her again, his body hitched up on one elbow while he touched over her jaw with his fingertips. “Tell me why ya brought me back.”

She curled her fingers around his cock and guided him inside of her. The fit was snug, but his eagerness to be inside of her would soften her up in time, she was sure of that. The moment he felt himself pulled in to the very base, Sean let go of an overwhelmed moan, one that threatened to splinter.

Ophelia didn't want to hear what coming back felt like, but she didn't mind talking about why she reached into the dark for him.

He deserved to know.

“I never got a chance to kiss you,” she said.

His hips snapped forward, stomach grinding between her legs. Pleasure lanced upward from her clit, throbbing through her hips, making her breath skitter out of her lungs.

Her mouth found his ear. Her teeth, the lobe.

“I wanted you to know how I felt,” she said. “Stealing you out of death's hands was the surest way I know how to express myself.”

 _Love_ , her body cried out, right down tot he marrow in her bones. _The word is love_.

 _Say it_.

Sean tugged at her thigh, pulling it up a few inches higher and sinking even deeper inside of her. The word nearly burst from her chest rather than her mouth. Fully-formed, a strident cry of relief.

He ran himself ragged as she spoke to him. He rutted, moaning, his flushed cheek pressed to hers as he kept the same, relentless pace.

 _How do you feel_? his body begged of hers.

Ophelia whined and let her head fall back against Sean's pillow, flattened over time, but soft to the touch. “I love you,” she told him, the words staggered by the determined thrust of his hips. “I would dig up a thousand graves for you, to keep bringing you back to me. I would, if I had to.”

His body went stiff as a board, and he pulled in a sharp gasp against her jaw. Another desperate downward push of his hips was all he needed to bring him over, to bring him off.

Sean moaned long and low, his mouth pressed so close to her skin that the sound was muffled almost beyond recognition.

But she knew. God, she knew.

“Ophelia,” he said. On his tongue, her name sounded like pennies cast into a wishing well. “Ollie.”

His cum ran thin as water, dripping out of her the moment he pulled away. But he didn't stray far. He wrapped her up in his arms and pulled her close, getting her bloomers up around her waist and her skirt down around her ankles and her lips close to his for another kiss or a hundred.

“Never thought I'd find a girl like you,” Sean told her. She felt his hands shaking against her back. She felt the burning of his skin through her blouse. She felt him, there, raised from the dead. Hers, and alive again. “One who'd steal me heart, much less give the good Lord the middle finger for trying to take me.”

Ophelia laughed and smiled and kicked her worries aside where they could not reach her, not for a few hours.

“I never thought I...”

“That you'd find a boy like me?” he chimed in. His smile was sharp against her cheek. “Seems unlikely. I'm one of a fucking kind.”

She dipped her head forward and nestled into the crook of his throat.

His heartbeat was too fast, but she remembered feeling it speeding beneath his skin long before he took a shot to the brain. When she sat upon his lap in a crowded saloon and introduced himself, she felt his pulse racing, even just with a passing touch.

Ophelia shut her eyes. “You are,” she told him. “And I'm coming to terms with all that I've given you.”

The blue-trimmed night passed quietly with such a warm body beside her. She slept and slept, memorizing the new heat of his body and the frenzy of his resting heart, knowing she would take him with her no matter where she went.


	3. Chapter 3

The next time someone died, they were brought right to Ophelia rather than being put into the ground for her to dig up with her bare hands.

She appreciated the convenience of it all.

The pressure, she could have done without.

God had hung grief in her throat like an old hat. Miserable bastard. Her fingertips tapped together, knowing and fearing their power all at once.

Before Sean, she'd only raised one person – her papa, and he didn't last too long once she brought him back. Not because her magic wore out, but because he changed his mind. So, he ate a bullet, and she didn't have the heart to try a second time.

Standing there in the dark above Lenny and Hosea's outstretched bodies, Ophelia's heart hammered, fast as a fist on a door. She glanced up at Sadie, then over at Charles.

They brought them back. They were the only ones not sleeping off their mourning and tears.

Even Sean was back on the bedrolls they set up close together. She understood that. Sometimes, he could believe things were just as they had been before he got shot. Not knowing what the whole ordeal looked like made believing easier, made feeling alive and vital easier.

She didn't blame him.

But she was lonely, standing out there on her own, newer to the gang than Charles but not quite so new as Sadie.

“Who do I bring back first?” she asked, mostly to herself.

Charles worked his jaw to the right and to the left as he considered her question and considered the options. “Does... how long they've been dead change anything?” he asked. She could hear the frayed end of the rope in his voice. It had been days, after all. Days since Hosea and Lenny were gunned down in Saint Denis.

Ophelia picked at a bit of dry skin on her bottom lip with her teeth.

“I don't know.”

Sadie's shoulders rose and fell with a shrug. “Aw, great.” She rapped her knuckles against Charles's arm. “I told ya we should've just buried them. All of this don't make any sense, anyway.”

Ophelia stepped forward, as decisive as she was capable of being, and straddled Lenny's thighs. His skin was ashen, like burned out wood, but there was no washing his youth away. She was only six years older than him, but she felt like halfway like a mother as she settled down and tucked her fingertips against his palms.

The last time she attempted this, only hours had passed since Sean crossed the threshold into death. And the first time she did it, minutes. Her papa cracked his head on the edge of a bar during a fight and bled out in her lap. She had been right there.

But now...

“The minstrel boy will return, we pray.” Her voice was stronger, floating easily out of her as it hadn't back near Clemens Point and all those weeks ago. Better for Lenny to hear it. Better to bring him back. “When we hear the news, we will all cheer it.”

Behind her, faintly, Ophelia heard boots shifting on the grass and a hoarse, “Why the hell's she singing?”

“Part of the ritual, maybe.”

Ophelia leaned forward, the warmth of her palms leeching the cold from Lenny's skin. She hummed the tune between lyrics, remembering more and more of her papa with every new note. His smile, his laugh. The way people called for him and thanked him profusely, the way old men and women at church pressed their palms to her cheeks and their skin was fire-hot.

He kept everyone alive. If he could do that, she could, too. Maybe then, Dutch would keep her safe. Maybe then, she'd never have to say goodbye to any of her new friends.

She pushed away thoughts of her papa and turned everything back around to Lenny, her body rocking closer to his, her hands crowding against his. A stack of books, a set of golden scales, Mary-Beth's smile, Arthur's joy, Dutch's pride and understanding – that's what she gave to him.

“The minstrel boy will return one day.”

Tears fringed her eyes, sticking to long, orange lashes as she reached through that dark with her whole heart rather than just her hands, wishing she knew Lenny better, wishing she had any right way to bring him back for certain.

And then, she felt him. 

Even before the verse was finished, Ophelia felt his hands jump beneath hers, muscles jerking. She grabbed for his wrists, pinning them down, keeping him steady on the bedroll Charles laid out for them both. Something soft to wake up on. Something familiar, with the stars above their head and the shadow of Shady Belle far away.

“Ssh,” she whispered as his body pulsed violently beneath her. “Settle down now. It's gonna be okay.”

Over her shoulder, she heard Sadie whisper a disbelieving, “God alive.”

Only when Lenny quieted did Ophelia let go of his wrists, and that's when she sought out his face with those same hands, thumbing over his cheeks as she stared down at him. His dark eyes flickered up at her, wide and unseeing. Just like Sean, there was a hole above his brow. He'd need a hat.

“Can you say something for me, sweetheart?”

At the sound of her voice again, at her touch, Lenny's furious blinking slowed. It slowed, and he looked up at her, and she could tell that he saw.

“That was... strange.”

His voice crackled and spat like a record that hadn't been put on properly, but it was there. And his smile was there, too, confused but tucked into a corner of his soft mouth.

Ophelia chuckled and gave his chest a pat. 

“At least you ain't covered in dirt.”

Then, she rose up onto her feet, feeling an almost unwavering confidence fall over her. Three people, she'd raised from the dead. Three people, she brought back.

As Charles and Sadie helped Lenny up, Ophelia straddled Hosea's narrow hips and lowered herself down on top of him.

His hands were freezing cold, and the skin over his swollen knuckles felt more like paper than flesh. But no matter, she tucked her hands against his, resting them palm-to-palm, and she stepped into that impenetrable dark, treading light behind her.

The song found her again, her voice low and honey-sweet as she followed the unseen path she'd taken before. Deep into the dark, she went, led by nothing but a tender pull behind her sternum.

Three men in a boat, laughing and singing. Cain licking the palm of his hand. Lenny leaning over with a book in-hand, sharing a passage. She gave him Grimshaw setting a bowl of stew in front of him and Abigail laughing at one of his jokes. She gave him Silver Dollar, hoofs patting the hard-packed dirt and grass as he brushed them.

“—Torn perhaps in body, not in spirit,” she sang out, stronger as she went on. Stronger, and a little nervous.

There was no light, no feeling reaching back to her.

Desperation felt no better than a bath full of ice water. Those thoughts and memories she pushed forward like an offering twisted, changing, becoming something different almost against her will.

Dutch, furious, his pointed forefinger sharp as a knife.

Arthur, dragging his feet through camp, weighed down with the weight of everything as well as exhaustion. 

Braithwaite manor in flames. The Grey boys, dead. Valentine and Strawberry strewn with bodies. And in the end, a riverboat sailing on a river of blood, stars like flecks of bone overhead.

She sang louder, harder. 

“Then may he play on his harp in peace,” Ophelia called out, more words than lyrics, though she still carried the tattered remains of a tune. She gripped Hosea's hands tight in her own; it felt like clutching onto cold, metal rods. “In a world such as heaven intended.”

The song was close to ending, just as the crushing darkness began to press more sharply inward. Her hands trembled, forearms burning under the strength of her grip.

But there was nothing.

Hosea was gone.

“No,” Ophelia whimpered. She surged forward, her head hanging low, orange curls pooling on Hosea's chest. “Come back. You've got reason enough. Come on...”

She struggled against the primal urge to pull away, to snatch her hands back and see the light again.

She struggled hard.

“For all the bitterness of man must cease,” Ophelia sang, the power and confidence of her voice waning in favor of an impossible to control tremor. “And ev'ry battle must be ended.”

A sob wrenched out of her. The black finality of death closed around her, crowding her, pushing her out one step at a time. 

There was no going forward. 

No pulling him back. 

Hands closed down on her shoulders, pulling her with enough force to send her sprawling away from Hosea's body and onto the ground. The blinding brilliance of the moon forced her to blink, spilling tears out of the corners of her eyes. 

“No,” she said, scrambling over the limbs of Charles or Sadie or whoever it was that brought her out. “No, I have to—”

But the arms around her middle were steel, and they were warm.

Like they'd just been pulled out of a forge.

“'e's gone,” Sean said. When he felt her go limp in his embrace, he coaxed his arms more gently around her middle. “D'you even know what would happen if you got stuck in there?”

She didn't.

Ophelia didn't know the first thing about what she could do. She was still learning.

Sometimes, learning ended in an accidental death.

But not hers. Sean wouldn't let that happen, and Ophelia didn't want that. Because, maybe, when she died, her magic went with her. If her magic went with her, Sean would die, too. Lenny. They deserved better than that. They deserved what she knew she could give them.

She was the queen of second chances, after all.

So long as the person wanted one.

Turning into Sean's chest, Ophelia shut her eyes and bit down on her back teeth. “Dutch is gonna hate me,” she whispered. “I couldn't bring him back. I couldn't... do anything for him.”

“Now, that ain't true. You did plenty,” Sean told her, resting his lips against her hairline. “You brought me back an' Lenny.”

“But not Hosea.”

Not his best friend.

“Hosea was ready for it, I tink.” Sean's offer was sweet enough to entice her. She tilted her head up, and their eyes met. The sight of them pushed away some of the chill. “It's no wonder he just kept walkin'.”

She nodded, and when she shut her eyes again, Ophelia leaned heavily against Sean's chest.

“I hope he finds some kinda rest.”

“I'm sure he will, love.” Fingers curled at the nape of her neck, beneath her heavy fall of hair. His warmth of his touch eased the bands of tension under her skin. “I'm sure he will.”

No one asked any questions. Not Charles, not Sadie. They left them there until it was time to bury Hosea.

And when they did, she sang her song again.


End file.
